More like FUNbruary, am I rite??

a February (+ belated January) letter of news!

HELLO ya cuties, for the first time in 2024! Many apologies for not touching base since December, oops, and no apologies at all for the title of this post. Begin as you mean to go on, and as you’ve always been, aka as a lover of bad wordplay etc. That’s how the saying goes, right? Lots to catch you up on, plus preview for the near future, so in the words of the radio-edited mid-00s Black Eyed Peas¹, Let’s Get It Started~

Wild About You Updates!

What we all care about the most, right??² We’re just under THREE MONTHS until Wild About You is out in the world! I can hardly believe it!!! There are so many exciting things happening for this book, a couple of which I can share today—

We have a full cover wrap!

This is your ~exclusive first look~ as newsletter subscribers at the book’s full exterior before I share it far and wide because it’s too beautiful not to 😍

I meeeannnn!! LOOK AT IT! I couldn’t be more in love with the gorgeous sunset-y spine, all the colors of the text, and the blurbs from authors I adore and admire so much! I’m very proud of the tagline “the trail to true love doesn’t come with a map.” I know I also wrote the whole book and that’s arguably more to be proud of…but the tagline tho! If you want this beauty on your shelves, you can be my new fav person and pre-order today 😍 Next up—

WAY is being published under a brand new imprint!

This largely won’t make a difference to those of you who are like “I’ve never heard of an imprint in my life, I just read book” and that’s 100% okay, but trust me that it’s good news! The publisher of my first two books, Delacorte Press, recently announced that they’re starting a separate imprint for romance, appropriately called Delacorte Romance. WAY is the second of five books coming out in their launch season, which means a variety of fun changes for this book and how it’ll be rolled out, including the cute lil heart logo on the spine (see above). I’m really grateful to be part of the imprint’s first season and hopeful that it’ll make WAY’s launch my most exciting yet!

Pre-order campaign and tour info are in the works!

My wonderful publicist³ has been working hard on scheduling events with a few bookstores to celebrate this release, and I’ll have specific cities/dates for you soooon! I’m so looking forward to meeting new readers, seeing familiar ones again (hi Lexington & Knoxville), and wrapping up my reality showmance trio with lots o’ celebrations. I’ll also once again have a way for you to pre-order signed copies and receive STICKERZZZ as a token of my gratitude! I designed and ordered the stickers this past week and may I just say, I think I’ve outdone myself? They are so CUTE not to toot my own horn but toot toot my dudes!⁴ In the meantime, pls pls pls:

In previous book updates,

I recently learned that Love from Scratch is getting another paperback printing! I feel so lucky that almost two years since it came out, new readers are still finding my debut and giving it a chance. I know two years doesn’t seem like long, but when you’re deep in the publishing trenches, particularly for your first book, it’s hard to have any perspective on a book’s longevity. A new round of titles comes out every Tuesday, and by a couple weeks after your book’s release, if you’re not hitting bestseller lists or otherwise having obvious, runaway success, it can feel like that’s the end of it—your book is as big as it’s ever going to get, everyone has moved on to newer, shinier reads. If you’ve been around these newsletter streets a while, you’ve heard me talk about the Ways Publishing Makes Me Feel Bad/Invisible/Irrelevant too many times!

All that to say, it’s incredibly satisfying to see the signs that my career had not, in fact, peaked by late April 2022. The fact that LFS is still on bookstore shelves, when that space is ever more scarce, is a pretty big deal to me! When I tell new acquaintances/total strangers the titles of my books⁵ and they say, “Oh, I’ve heard of that!”, instead of assuming they’re lying to make me feel better about myself, I’ve actually started defaulting to…believing them?? What a weird and interesting author journey it’s been, one where I take nothing for granted, remain SO grateful for every reader who’s given my work a chance, and have high hopes that this ~slow burn~ of a career keeps getting HOTTER🔥🥵⁶

Five Faves of February

There are few things I love more than breaking my thoughts down into lists, so I’m going to catch you up on some other recent happenings via my top five faves (events, people, reality shows, etc) of this month. Might keep it up for every newsletter⁷, or might drop it as randomly as I’ve started and stopped any other recurring features. Just keepin u on ur toes!

1. Love Y’all Fest

Baby’s first romance book festival! Plus the first time this festival has happened, and it was so much FUN! Definitely a highlight of the year already. I loved meeting so many authors and readers, hanging out in person for the first time with folks I’ve known online for years, getting to ramble on panels about the genre that I adore with some of my biggest writer inspirations. It was an honor to be there among so many lovely humans with this shared passion and I hope to do a lot more events like this. I also joked on insta about sharing my top 5 author crushes from the festival but there are way too many to name. This lineup was ridiculous and highly crushable!! If I met you at Love Y’all, I probably want to be your best friend or have already established us as besties in my head. In the chillest way possible. I am so chill. Invite me to your book festival and admire my chillness.

2. Reader gifts 🥹

I was also lucky to be my friend Gwenda Bond’s conversation partner a couple weeks ago at her delightful launch event for an equally delightful book, The Frame-Up! It’s so fun to talk about writing with Gwenda (or really anything) so if you ever get a chance to go to a signing of hers, I highly recommend it. But a particularly cool surprise that evening was my reader pal Casey (@caseyreadsthings on insta), who I’ve met at my Joseph-Beth events before, bringing the most adorable gift! She made a little cross-stitch paw for Jolene!! 🥹 in the colors of the Wild About You cover!!! 🥹 I showed it to Jolene when I got home and she tried to eat it, which is how you know it’s appreciated. Thanks again, Casey! Also while at Love Y’all Fest, I got my very first book-related friendship bracelet from Jordan (@theheartofabookblogger), making all my Swiftie dreams come true 😭💘 Thank you Jordan!

3. Glasses

As you may have noticed, I now have prescription glasses, because I turned thirty and my body said “might as well give up,” I guess! Just kidding. It’s more likely because of all the times I read and play games on my phone in bed in total darkness and have fleeting thoughts about whether it’s bad for my eyes before deciding that my temporary entertainment is more important. Thank you to modern optometry and all the folks who recommended places to get cute + affordable glasses for improving my life in this small but big way. Someday I’ll get less self-conscious about how I look wearing them, and with confidence AND corrected vision?? It’s game over for the haters! Who knows what I’m capable of!

4. Olivia Rodrigo concert tickets

One day out of the blue, t*cketm*ster⁸ slid into my inbox, whispering, “your time has come,” and lo and behold, I was A Chosen One + made it off the waitlist when my local venue added more seats for Olivia’s concert this summer! Still can’t believe I will be THERE in the same room as my fave, singing about bloodsuckers, fame ****ers⁹ at the top of my lungs.

5. Jolene

Substack is telling me I’ve almost reached email length limit, so we’re calling it here! I don’t blame you if this was beyond your reading length limit, too. I hope this year is treating you well so far, I love you, and I’ll see you next month!!

xoxo,

Kaitlyn

1. Good time to tell you what I tell anyone around me when the Black Eyed Peas (or LMFAO or Ludacris) come up in convo, which is more often than one might expect—in 10th grade, I saw BEP in concert with my high school bestie and bestie’s mom (because we couldn’t drive) and the openers were LMFAO and Ludacris. It was fun and exactly as bizarre/random as it sounds. I still have and wear the t-shirt.

2. Lie to me, tell me “no, Kaitlyn, I’m here for your Black Eyed Peas anecdotes”

3. Hi Lili ur the best

4. There are also, pardon my french, a shit ton of stickers. You see, the more stickers you buy, the less cost difference there is between, pardon my algebra, x number of stickers and 2x number of stickers. So of course I got 2x and now I need you allll to preorder this book and come to my events and take stickers so I don’t end up with 2x-minus-12 stickers in my closet, staring me down like little adhesive reminders of the book that flopped 🥸

5. To be clear, I am not out there shouting “I write books! Ask me about my books!” at anyone who will listen; in fact, I’ve come to avoid small talk that will require me to say what I do for work, because that conversation so frequently becomes weird. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard, “I’ve always thought about writing a book, but—” I would’ve recently gotten a nickel from my new dentist

6. Ok you knew some silly analogy was coming to undercut my sincere emotions, don’t even act surprised

7. Though “Five Faves of March” already doesn’t have the same ring to it 🫤

8. It’s basically a curse word at this point

9. Now I’m just censoring myself at random. Oddly profane for a Kaitlyn Hill Newsletter today!